


Who is Henry Oak?

by Dareandwriteit



Category: Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast)
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Implied Oakson?, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 09:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25847599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dareandwriteit/pseuds/Dareandwriteit
Summary: When Henry Oak left for the soccer game, he was pretty certain he knew who he was. Hippy rock expert. Crunchy granola dad to two beautiful boys. Loving husband born in sunny San Dimas.Yeah.That sounded right.(A fic in which Henry learns that might not be right at all.)
Relationships: Darryl Wilson & Henry Oak, Glenn Close & Henry Oak
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	1. Before Ravenloft, In the Middle of Nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> Henry has an identity crisis for an identity, and boy that has to be hard!
> 
> Kinda spoilery for ep 38 on, but let's be honest, we're all making this up as we go along.

Darryl had never found it easy to sleep outdoors. When camping he’d learned to accept he’d be getting by on an hour or so of sleep. He had gotten on a little better since landing in the Forgotten Realms: a couple hours most nights, provided nothing woke him.

Tonight, Henry woke him.

Usually it was snoring, which often frustrated Darryl more than getting ambushed because you’re not allowed to be frustrated by snoring. No, tonight Henry was talking. Not even to someone, Darryl realised as he drearily patted at his pockets and found their only remaining cell phone still there. For someone who went on and on about ‘being considerate’ he sure couldn’t shut up sometimes. What was he even-

“You’re Henry. You’re Henry. You’re Henry.”

Oh.

That didn’t sound like something Darryl would allowed to yell at Henry to shut up about. Darryl slyly rolled over on his sleeping matt, trying to subtly glimpse Henry while pretending he was still sleep.

Man. Maybe his was creepy. Maybe he shouldn’t spy. Oh well, he’d already rolled over, too late to stop now.

Henry had a thousand yard stare boring into the smouldering campfire that Darryl had forgotten to put out before falling asleep. He was sat on the ground, posture bleeding so much tension that Darryl felt his chest tighten in sympathy. Knees pressed up tight into his chest, chin pressed tight over them. His fingers were tangled in his blond hair with an intensity that had to hurt, there were strands he’d already pulled out, _why didn’t he stop?_ He was rocking back and forth minutely on his spot, repeating “you’re Henry” with every sweep forward.

“You’re Henry, you’re Henry, you’re Hen-”

Darryl must’ve moved or something because Henry suddenly fixed him with a panicked stare. Maybe it was the dark or the just Darryl’s own exhaustion but Darrly could’ve sworn Henry’s eyes glowed. Not like the reflection of fire on the frames of his glasses. Something feral and sharp, like a cat.

“Whoa, hey, Henry, y’aright?” Darryl stuttered, quick to sit up now he’d been caught staring.

“I-I-I-I don’t know.” Henry struggled to say even that, as though his mouth struggled to recall how to form the words.

“You don’t seem…” Darryl started, desperately wishing he was the one freaking out and Henry could do the calming down. Henry was much better at this stuff.

“I don’t- am I still me?” Henry asked, breathless and sincere.

Darryl barked a laugh. What a stupid question. Of course he was. Who the hell else could a guy as out there as Henry be anything other than himself-

Henry flinched at the noise, turning his head away from Darryl. His ears were pointed sharp, like a cats, and pressed back like he was terrified. Darryl’s hand reached for his axe without thinking, because Henry was acting like he was in danger and that’s what they did when there was danger. The second Darryl's fingers bumped the axe, he felt horribly guilty.

Even when he’s not sure who he is, Darryl knows Henry isn’t dangerous.

“It’s okay Henry.” Darryl said softly, putting his palms up like he was calming a spooked animal. “I know exactly who you are.”

“I turned into a bear!” Henry snapped, his voice dipping down an octave as he did so. It made Darryl’s stomach drop, it was so unlike Henry it felt terrifying.

“...and that was surprising for all of us, true. But you’re still Henry.”

“Am I?!” Henry shouted again, suddenly looming over Darryl. Was he always this tall? Hard to be sure. He’d never seen Henry this angry, it was making it hard to remember anything outside of this moment.

“Of course.” Darryl said. God he hoped he sounded sure. His hands were shaking as took Henry’s.

“H-how can you be sure?” Henry said, sounding a little more like his panicky self.

“Because Henry Oak, even after he just turned into _bear_ , didn’t want to let our campfire burn the forest down. You put it out, even with all this magic Lord of the Rings bullshit crashing down around you.” Darryl squeezed Henry’s hands, hoping it was helping. “And I bet, even when you’re freaking out, you want to lecture me about forgetting, don’t you?”

That finally got a smile out of Henry, however small. “Forgotten camp setups cause more wildfires than anything in nature, Darryl.”

“Look, this world is terrifying Henry. I’m not pretending it’s not. This whole place is fucked up beyond recognition. So we gotta stay solid for each other. Strong line of defence, all four of us. I know I can count on you.”

He let go of Henry’s hands, leaving him looking a little lost. Darryl tucked a hand behind his back and offered his right hand to Henry.

“Darryl Wilson. It’s nice to know you, Henry Oak.”

Henry took the hand and shook it.

He wished he could share the sentiment.


	2. Across the Compound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Canary finds Henry Oak a very funny joke that Hen doesn't seem to know he's telling.
> 
> Taking place as Canary takes Henry to go have his soul put in a homoculous. The other dads are having a "band huddle". Don't worry about it.

Canary was so nice. God Henry wished he didn’t feel bad about kind of hating her for it. It wasn’t her fault. It’s what Oakvale does to people. It sands them down, shapes them, makes them nice. Not good, not bad, not _happy_. Nice. Nice, nice, nice. All the way down.

God he hates it.

Or he would. It’s not nice to hate people.

“This way Sir Hen!” She said, beckoning him over to one of the rudimentary buildings in the corner of the compound. She skipped ahead, wobbling with each hop the same way his two boys did when they played hopscotch as little kids. 

His stomach curled at the thought of anything from this place reminding him of Lark and Sparrow.

“Please, Canary, call me Henry.” He settled on grumbling under breath, trying to focus on the one thing here he knew for certain. That his name was Henry.

“But Sir Hen, your father gave-” She began, and Henry felt his frustration immediately spike. No-one in this place ever listened, god it was like talking to a wall.

“I don’t care. It’s Henry now. Just Henry. No Sir, no nothing. Understand?” He clenched his fists, tried to ignore the pounding pressure in his skull from forcing himself to sound calm.

Canary giggled, turning back to him with an amused grin on her face. “It just sounds so silly! Like calling me, oh, I don’t know… ‘Russett’. Could you even imagine?”

She sounded as though she could imagine it very well. No-one had a new name so specific lined up with having thought about it even once. “You could call yourself that. If you wanted to, I mean.” 

“But being a Ry’Oak is our greatest privilege! And you, you’re _Sir Hen_! You’re at the very top of our wonderful commune! Aren’t you excited to be reunited with our benefactor?” She beamed, completely steamrolling over the sentiment. 

“I, uh, I don’t-” He didn’t know how to talk about it without ending up back in a panic spiral. He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt, which was so filthy that he just smeared mud over the already permanently fogged lenses. Canary noticed this, curiosity immediately piqued.

“What are those doodads?” She said, pausing outside the door of the building to look closer at them.

“Oh, they’re my glasses! My wife Mercedes helped me pick them, technically they’re my spares but-” He started babbling, but Canary placed a hand on the arm of the glasses and cut him off.

“May I try them?” She asked, in that tone that suggested the question itself made her nervous. That he might snap at her for even troubling him with the request. Henry stumbled over himself to assuage that feeling, to dispel that comparison she was drawing between himself and Barry. He quickly passed the glasses over to her, after trying to wipe off the worst of the dirt.

“Oh, uh, sure! They’re a pretty strong prescription though, try and be careful.”

She held the glasses up to light, peering owlishly through the lens. They were large frames, big enough to make her own small face seem even younger. She was holding them as though she might shatter them, fingers tightly gripping the edges. Henry suddenly realised he might not have been very clear, he’d forgotten just how much obvious stuff he hadn’t known as a young adult.

Oh. Well, at least that made a little more sense now.

“You can wear them. Just be careful not to get a headache, the boys always joke about how I’m basically blind.”

She slipped them onto her face, squinting and blinking like she was staring at the sun. Her gaze tracked over the compound, the crowd of faces that no doubt looked even more the same in the blur, over the trees that must be nothing but smudges of green and brown, before finally settling on Henry’s face. She raised and lowered the glasses a few times, comparing how Henry looked different through the glasses. She seemed curious, confused, almost irritated by how the lenses made no sense. It was the first time since meeting her she’d seemed like a human being.

And then she went back to being nice.

“Why would you do this? It must be so hard to see anything!” She giggled again, insipid and stupid in a way her previous curiosity had proved she was not.

“Well, it’s correcting my eyes, so it actually makes things look clear for me.” Henry explained, holding his hand out for the glasses. Canary didn’t take them off, studying his face with a bemused… pity? Condescension?

“Why haven’t you just fixed it?” She asked.

“F-fixed it?” He stuttered, hand frozen as it reached for his glasses.

“Your eyes. We have healing magic, it wouldn’t be very hard. Our benefactor just needs to place his hands on you and _pop_! Perfect Ry’Oak eyes.” Canary said this as though it wasn’t horrifying.

“Well.. I don’t want to.” Henry stuttered, caught on the word pop. Pop is not a word that should be mentioned in a conversation about eyes.

She laughed, condescension in every sound. “Well why wouldn’t ya want to be fixed?”

He felt his hackles raise, a lump of rage settling in his throat. “Maybe I’m fine just as I am.”

“You said you were basically blind! Why wouldn’t you do anything about it?”

“Because it’s not a problem to me, I like my glasses, my wife chose them.” He says testily, trying to resist the urge to snatch his glasses back from her.

Maybe it’s the fact he’s not got his glasses on, but at the word “wife” he could swear her expression shifted. Just a tiny bit. A little admission of disbelief. Not a real wife. How sweet for him to have deluded himself into believing that.

His resistance to getting angry cracked irreversibly.

“Just give them back, s-stop talking about it!” He said, holding his hand out with a little more force. 

Canary didn’t seem to notice he was upset. She just handed him the glasses. “I’ll talk to your father, see if he can make some time to fix your eyes. He’s just been so busy setting up your return.”

Henry pushed his glasses back up his face, pausing with his hand pressed over his eyes. He couldn’t do this, he couldn’t keep insisting on his own autonomy, fighting for things as simple as spare glasses and surnames.

“Yeah.” He sighed, quickly wiping away a few tears before setting the glasses properly on his face. “That’s very nice of you, Canary.”


	3. At an Inn, After the Fight in Ravenloft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glenn offers Henry something to help with the problem of thinking.
> 
> (Trigger warning for drugs, but only in the same way they talk about them in the show: with little to no practical knowledge and/or actual drug use.)

Henry couldn’t sleep. Everytime he felt like he was about to- after a fight like that there was no denying he was completely exhausted - his father’s voice would flash through his mind.

_“How can I respect your choices if you don’t make good ones?”_

Ugh.

He didn’t realise how much he’d miss not remembering anything about his father. 

So he got up, left Lark and Sparrow sleeping in each other's arms (oh, he wished he still had a phone so he could send a picture to Mercedes) and TJ curled up in bed with Ron lying ramrod still on the floor next to him. It was always kind of frightening to see him sleep like that, he took “sleep like the dead” to a whole new level.

He didn’t really know where he was going, or even if he could trust leaving them alone after that battle earlier. But what more could he do even if he stayed? Glenn and Ron had almost died when they had a whole army supporting them. Henry couldn’t hope to do much more than maybe slow Barry down by disappointing him again.

He ended up outside the inn. He wandered to the stables, hoping he could retrieve something that could make him feel less alien. Maybe if he dug around in the trunk he’d find something familiar to eat, or some actually soft blankets. He’d take a normal earth air freshener at this point. Anything to remind him of home.

There was hay everywhere: like someone had just used a hay bale as a punching bag or something. Henry guessed Darryl had been there, when he’d woken him to talk about his team or something (he couldn’t really remember what) he’d been covered in hay. It hadn’t seemed weird at the time. And sat on the hood of the van, seemingly unbothered by the hay everywhere, was Glenn. He was smoking something potent enough that Henry’s eyes watered as he walked in.

At least he was nice enough to not light it inside the van.

“Glenn? What are you doing up so late? Everything alright with Nick?” Henry said, dad voice creeping in out of instinct.

“Nick’s cool. Why wouldn’t he be?”

To be fair to Glenn, Henry didn’t know how to answer that question either. Glenn offered the lit blunt with an eyebrow raised, not a word spoken to incriminate them.

“No. I can’t… Don’t. Not for me.”

“Relax man, it’s not an after school special. I can’t exactly get more of these.”

“I guess not.” Henry admitted, settling on a bale of hay opposite the van so the smoke wasn’t too strong. It wasn’t very comfortable, but at least he was expecting that. He couldn’t remember why he knew that.

“You never know. You seem pretty uptight, might help you out.”

Henry splutters for twenty seconds or so before saying, “I’m not uptight.”

Glenn just chuckles at that. “Sure sounds that way.”

Henry feels his face burn, his pulse race. What right did Glenn have to judge him? He was the one with the problem of not caring enough.

“I’m not a complete straight edge, I’ll have you know I’ve done my fair share of the devil's lettuce.”

Glenn laughs at that despite being mid drag, coughing as he laughs heartily.

“It’s not funny Glenn! I almost died! I ended up lost in the woods for days, it permanently wrecked my memory.” Henry snapped, crossing his arms in frustration.

“From weed though?! That’s bullshit.”

“It wasn’t weed, it was…” What was it? He didn’t remember the party- it must’ve been a party, why else would he have done something like this, he doesn’t think he’d done anything like that before then. “I don’t know.”

“There’s your problem then. Don’t just take stuff blind, dumbass.”

Henry exhales, feeling his head pounding as he tries to resist getting mad at Glenn. He wanted to take a deep breath, wanted to calm down, but his father's voice - “in through the nose and out through the mouth”- made him unsure how to take calming breaths. He settled on an uneven, wheezing cycle of breathing in and out that verged on hyperventilating.

Glenn said nothing for a minute, before quietly saying, “Forget about him man, we got away.”

“I just... I ran as far away as I could from him, hundreds of miles, and he’s still right there, intruding in my life and trying to control me.” Henry rubbed his arms, hoping the sensation will help him calm down. He just found the strands of hay irritating, focusing on picking them off his shirt instead.

“Don’t think space makes a difference.” Glenn sniffed, clearly not with it as he stumbled through the truth in a daze. “With my old man, there could be hundreds of miles between us in the same room.”

Henry wanted to snap at Glenn, to say that wasn’t helping, but… this wasn’t like him. Maybe it was one of those introspective weed moods Glenn had mentioned before. He certainly hadn’t gone as far as admitting the purple robes were their dads before now.

“How come?” Henry asked, softly.

“Bad vibes.” Glenn said, as though that explained everything. “He’s gone now, doesn’t matter.”

“I mean, he was right there-”

"Why aren't you mad at your dad?” Glenn interrupted Henry to say it, as though it had just jumped into his mind. 

“What?”

“He seems like a jerk, you aren't usually chill with those." Glenn said, as though it was nothing.

"W-w-what... well, why aren't you mad at yours?" Henry stuttered, unable to find what else to say.

"Being mad would mean I think about him.” Glenn said, before pointing the blunt at Henry in an accusatory jab. “It’s why you shouldn’t think so much. He won’t make you feel like shit that way.”

Henry laughed, a little cold. “That easy huh? Just stop thinking.”

“Yeah!” If Glenn noticed Henry’s sour mood, he didn’t let it on. “Just turn the old brainbox down. Honestly, try this stuff, it helps, I swear.”

Glenn offered the blunt again, more enthusiastic this time, but Henry just shook his head and hands frantically.

“No. No! Glenn, you shouldn’t try not to think! There’s so much good in the world, how can you enjoy it when you’re not letting yourself think about it?”

“I dunno man. I enjoy it more than you, at least.” 

Man.

Maybe Henry really was bad at making choices.


End file.
